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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/28901184">Wasp Nest</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/LilithsHoney/pseuds/LilithsHoney'>LilithsHoney</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Alternate Universe - Werewolf, Animal Death, Creature Fic, Dreams and Nightmares, Gothic, Hogwarts Sixth Year, M/M, Panic Attacks, Werewolf Draco Malfoy</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-01-21</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-01-21</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-13 10:21:01</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>5,764</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/28901184</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/LilithsHoney/pseuds/LilithsHoney</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Draco Malfoy has returned to Hogwarts as a werewolf, with the sole objective of killing the headmaster. The life and honour of his family hangs in the balance, but he is unwilling to use his new wolf powers to accomplish his goal. Memories fracture and lines blur as the call of the moon grows stronger, night and day.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Draco Malfoy/Harry Potter</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>8</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>75</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Wasp Nest</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“<em>Like a child, I flinch at violence, wherever I find it. Even when I am the seed. Even when I am the sacrifice,” </em></p><p>- Yves Olade, <em>Mercy</em></p><p> </p><p>‘</p><p> </p><p>Draco woke up with his face to the ground. The smell of earth and decaying leaves filled him up as his body returned to life, cold to the bone and aching, as if all of his joints had been reset at once. As he pushed himself up from the forest floor, he saw that his face had been resting in the half-eaten remains of a dead rabbit. Recoiling from it, he let out a scream that shook him awake.</p><p>The rabbit’s head stared back at him, strawberry pupils blown wide, mirroring his own shock, tiny paws crossed neatly in front of it. Draco could taste it now, stale and coppery on the back of his teeth, dried at the corners of his mouth and dripped grimly down his pointed chin. The rabbit’s back end was gone, leaving only a stringy dark nerve, threaded through small, white vertebrae beads, trailing off from the furry shoulders in a stark ellipsis. Black disgust slicked Draco’s insides.</p><p>Standing naked in the clearing didn’t feel vulnerable any more. The Forbidden Forest knew him now, and he had claimed his place within it. Staggering as the blood returned to his limbs, Draco retrieved his robes, cloak and school bag from the hollow of a nearby tree, dressing himself in a hurry. Making his way over the grounds, he felt more himself after spelling away the evidence of last night’s dinner.</p><p>No sooner had he stepped over the threshold of the castle, Draco threw up the tail end of the rabbit at the foot of a rather affronted gargoyle.</p><p>"Rough night?” it croaked, awkwardly looking away.</p><p>Draco made no reply, head bowed low and defeated as he gripped the gargoyle’s shoulder for support. Fragments of bone, viscera and bile pooled darkly at his feet. Why did the wolf take in what his human body couldn’t handle?</p><p> </p><p>*</p><p> </p><p>“Stay here, Draco,” the ease and grace was gone from Narcissa Malfoy’s voice, as she regarded her son through the narrow slit of his bedroom door “Don’t leave this room.”</p><p>He heard the lock shift with a wordless incantation.</p><p>There had been many night time visits to the manor in the summer since his father’s arrest. They were not like the visits of the summer before, when Draco had eagerly lingered outside the games room, deciphering what he could from the furtive, scheming and hopeful whispers. Instead, now there were long silences in full rooms of Death Eaters, pauses pregnant with dread, or interrupted by his aunt’s lunatic episodes. He had preferred it when his family was small.</p><p>Draco sat on the bed, watching the grounds of the estate shift from dusk to twilight outside. His ears strained to hear the conversations carried upstairs through the fireplace behind him.</p><p>"Pull yourself together, Cissy!” came Bellatrix’s voice, shrill with irritation. Though Draco could not see her, he could hear from the dip of her speech that she was bearing down on his mother “You should be grateful – honoured – that the Dark Lord has given Draco this opportunity to absolve is Father’s failure. Don’t you see? This is mercy.”</p><p>Disgraceful sobs followed, swelling up until they broke into unintelligible funeral wails. Later, more voices crowded in. A gathering of a small few, anticipating darkly something which Draco did not know. “I can feel it coming,” barked a deep, growling voice, full of glee “Not long now––<em>ahwooooo</em><em>oooo</em><em>!</em>” followed by a great crack, the hushing of voices and the muffled squeaking of chairs, all parting to make room for one high, thin voice;</p><p>“Bring me Draco.”</p><p>The sound of his mother was more terrifying than the werewolf transforming in his family home. The desperation in her voice ripped violently through her lungs, tearing the safe, untouchable image Draco held of her apart. Hearing such fear ravaging her felt like a violation. The sound made him want to be a man, wishing to grow tall and strong in an instant, and fight her fear away. She could not protect him any more.</p><p>“Please,” she begged, still coming further undone “My lord, take me. He’s my son. My only son, please–!”</p><p>Fenrir Greyback’s last, triumphant howl consumed all other sound. It travelled through the manor and filled the corridors until it reached Draco’s bedroom door, seeking him out. Draco could barely move. Inhaling deeply, he sucked his child-self inside. He knew this night would never leave him.</p><p> </p><p>*</p><p> </p><p>“Imperio!”</p><p>Madame Rosmerta’s face suddenly went blank, her cat slipping smoothly through her fingers before trotting off into the night. The air behind the Three Broomsticks was still, apart from a fluffy torrent of steam billowing silently from the kitchen vent. Draco’s breath heaved as he stepped forward from the shadows, nervously inspecting the result of his curse.</p><p>Light spilled from the still open door behind Rosmerta, spotlighting her passive, waiting form.</p><p>“’You alright there, love?” she turned to Malfoy as if he were a customer.</p><p>“Take me inside,” he commanded, not lowering his wand.</p><p>“Right you are,” she replied, seemingly unphased.</p><p>Rosmerta led Draco inside. The pub had just closed. The enchanted stools were still turning themselves on their heads and setting themselves down on the table tops. The dull, domestic sound of the dishes washing themselves wondered from behind the bar, mixing with the crackle of the still burning fire in the grate.</p><p>The pleasant atmosphere did not relax him. Draco almost couldn’t believe the curse had worked so well the first time. It was, he had to admit, disappointing – he had expected to feel so different, as if in crossing an invisible line, he would finally become a true dark wizard. He had been practising on spiders and moths in the Room of Hidden Things, but it was something else entirely to see the effects of the curse on a real, human face.</p><p>Rosmerta stood expectantly near the bar, as if she were waiting for Draco to take her on a Sunday trip. Her expression was happy and easy, almost relieved. She would do anything he asked – that much was plain – not out of love, or eagerness to please, but because it would satisfy her in a way nothing else had. Completing his task would set her life right. It would give her certainty, simplicity. She would take his hands in hers and thank him afterwards.</p><p>A weight sagged in Draco’s chest. His Father had never looked like this. How could anyone have believed that he was under the Imperius curse? The lie had stretched on so well, for so many years. They could not have truly known him then, and knew him even less now. The loneliness of the thought was like an insult. Turning the enchanted galleon in his hand, Draco looked into Rosmerta’s bright eyes with renewed resolve.</p><p>“I need you to do something for me.”</p><p> </p><p>*</p><p> </p><p>Kneeling in the clearing, Draco braced himself. He could feel it coming already; the rank and sweet smells of the forest growing stronger in his nostrils, the hunger expanding into a deep, dragging pit in his stomach. Learning to recognise the signs did not make it easier. It made it worse.</p><p>Draco knelt, nude beneath the swaddle of his least favourite cloak. He had figured early on, that he would not have any robes left if he didn’t learn to hide them before he transformed. Shaking, he curled his body into a low bow, his face almost touching the ground – cursing the moon, cursing the Dark Lord, and cursing himself in his head in an endless, hateful loop. A dense mist closed in around him like a comforting embrace, shielding his eyes from the far off castle lights. <em>If you can’t see them, they can’t see you. </em></p><p>Transforming was deceptively quick and eternally painful. Draco cried out with everything he had, reaching deep into the bottom of his lungs, and further still, reaching down into the dirt, down through the earth, calling for the heart of the forest, tangled in all her knotted roots, to cry and bleed for him. His body stretched and snapped with the noise, breaking apart to be remade. Draco could feel himself slipping away, the last, painful parts of himself fighting to be heard, before he was gone: his father, screaming as Draco had never heard him before under the Dementor’s kiss, his guts turned to ice, his arms limp, dead, useless at his sides; his first transformation, a month after his bite. Hooded figures stood in a circle around him on the sprawling lawns of his estate. His greatest trauma was to be their spectator sport. He thought of Potter, hate and sympathy twisting his final conscious moments. His mother wouldn’t stop crying – mad with the loss of a son who was right in front of her – restrained by her sister, who now looked sane in comparison. The last thing he heard before the moon took him, was Greyback’s roaring celebration at his side, splitting his skull: “Your boy’s a real screamer!”</p><p>The wolf understood the moon in ways Draco did not. The moon was not a far off cosmic rock. She was a mother. She was a home, she was a hive. Her skin was not hard, but soft and supple as gossamer silk, woven into many white layers to house and conceal her brood. She has a voice, they have a voice, the wasps in the moon. They whisper together, conferring, humming, loving, their tiny wings beating out a drum-roll which precedes each snap and stride of the wolf.</p><p>The wasps in the moon are between the wolf’s ears, crawling across his mind. They watch him, encourage him, and know what’s good for him. Mother lights the way. Her glow is cold, but never cruel, full of every colour in the night. The wolf listens. The wolf follows.</p><p>In an effort to keep the wolf separate from himself, Draco tried not to dwell on memories from the wolf’s nights – the whispers of the moon, rushes of panic and euphoria, the power of his body. The morning after his first transformation, Draco woke up on top of his bedsheets. Someone – presumably, his mother – had cleaned and dressed him in his sleep. He felt dead. Raising himself up in the middle of the day, he avoided all mirrors.</p><p>Standing by his bedroom window, fascination had given way to horror. On the grass below him lay two albino peacocks, exploded in a mess of white and red, brutal and formless. The sight sickened him, but the thrill and fun of the chase was still in him, reverberating in his bones like an aftershock. Even as the pale false-eyes of the peacock feathers looked up into him, the urge was still there, ticklish under his skin, making him move and twitch were he stood.</p><p> </p><p>*</p><p> </p><p>Shrill panic built like the noise of a whistle in Draco’s mind. The vanishing cabinet wasn’t working. If anything, it was worse than when he started. Notes sent through for Borgin to mark returned aflame. Small creatures returned dead or pathetically disfigured, looking up at him with hopeless questioning before he dispatched them in a flash of green light.</p><p>Draco slammed the cabinet door on a motionless three headed mouse, trying in vein to swallow down his sobbing. He wept and moaned until hiccups bubbled up in his throat, echoing through the cavernous walls of hidden junk. Useless. It was all useless. His arms felt small and weak as a child’s.</p><p>The wasps in the moon spoke to him, buzzing with unsolicited advice. He could feel them, more and more the closer the full moon came – many tiny feet clamouring over one another to be heard by him, never not touching each other. The wasps said they could help. They could tell the wolf what to do, and he would do it. The wolf always listened to them. The wolf was built for murder and Draco was not. He was soft, juvenile and fearful of this new game, whereas the wolf had teeth and strength on his side. Beautiful red violence lit his eyes naturally. The wolf could do what needed to be done.</p><p>Leaning against the wood of the cabinet, Draco wiped his eyes on his sleeve. He steadied himself, closing off each emotional part of himself one at a time; slamming the door on every whispering, screaming room of his mind, until there was nothing else left, except the task at hand and the will to do it.</p><p>When he took up his wand again, his hands no longer shook. The incantations looped rhythmically round his tongue, as if trying to soothe the broken cabinet.</p><p>
  <em>You will get better. You will work for me. You will get better.</em>
</p><p> </p><p>*</p><p> </p><p>In his sleep, the wolf was roaming the castle, clearing its corridors and courtyards in long, powerful leaps which made the ancient school feel small. He wasn’t tempted by the smell of the students and their pets, collected together like hens in their warm beds. The wolf knew that his target was still awake. He could feel the pulse of his magic calling to him through the stones. The gargoyle leapt aside for him. His claws clattered excitedly up the spiral staircase.</p><p>Dumbledore sat waiting at his desk, his usually brilliant eyes were sad and impassive over his half-moon spectacles. The headmaster did not fight. He didn’t even reach for his wand, hands clasped together calmly on his lap, as the wolf leapt on to the desk. Teeth closed immediately on his throat, ripping it out without so much as a gasp. The old wizard’s magic spilled out from the wound, like an aurora breaking from a jagged horizon of mountaintops. A beautiful and awful light filled the room, colours pulsing brighter and brighter.</p><p>The wolf sang through the blood in his mouth. When his song was done, the room was dark. Dumbledore was gone. In the headmaster’s chair lay the twisted and fresh corpse of a rabbit. Human hands soaked in blood rose, shaking, into Draco’s vision. He, like the wolf, wanted to run.</p><p> </p><p>*</p><p> </p><p>Snape finally had him alone, strategically cornered after Defence Against the Dark Arts. Behind him, a cauldron was steaming ominously. Delicate blue vapour rose up from it with a poisonous, floral smell. Draco knew he had done well to avoid him for this long.</p><p>“Your moonlight wanderings have not gone unnoticed, Draco,” his voice was both warning and secretive, eyes staring fixedly from beneath his greasy hair, hoping to pin Draco down “The younger members of your house have come to me–”</p><p>“That’s never bothered you before,” he retorted, a little more petulantly than he had hoped.</p><p>“Your currant transformations are volatile and unsustainable,” Snape continued, pace steady and commanding “You have acted carelessly, without proper forethought for the consequences. It is only a matter of time before you are discovered, one way or another, and put on the register. You will not be able to carry out the task you have been assigned, with the eyes of Dumbledore and the Ministry on you”</p><p>“Even then, Dumbledore wouldn’t suspect me,” Draco’s voice rose excitedly, almost laughing “He loves half-breeds. He’d probably adopt me, let me sleep at the foot of his bed like a good little werew–“</p><p>“Keep your voice down,” Snape’s voice was a low rumble, each syllable lay down like cards that foretold Draco’s doom “You can’t afford mistakes. The end of your next cycle draws near,” Snape brought forward a goblet of the steaming potion from behind him. Its vapour seemed to seek Draco out, like fingers reaching for him. Instinctively, he drew back, the wolf growling from behind the cage for his ribs.</p><p>“Let me help you.”</p><p>“I don’t need your help,” Draco managed, fighting the urge to knock the goblet from the professor’s hands.</p><p>“Come to me, on the full moon,” a note of fear contaminated the urgency in Snape’s voice “I can ease the transition. I can contain you.”</p><p>“You’d like that, wouldn’t you? A chance to lock me up and steal all the glory for yourself!”</p><p>“There is no glory to be gained from streaking through the night as a wild animal. Why are you so reluctant to control the beast?”</p><p>Snape’s dark eyes searched him. Draco could feel him – what he was trying to do – like two ghostly hands, straining to pry his mind open. This attempt almost felt feeble in comparison to the lunatic potency of Bellatrix’s legilimency. She had broken easily through Draco’s mental defences, as if she were pressing her sharp fingers into the sickly flesh of rotting fruit.</p><p>“That won’t work on me,” Draco said quietly, meeting Snape’s eyes with defiance “My mind isn’t as wild and untameable as you think. Try again, if you like… if you really do want me to visit you on the next full moon.”</p><p>The threat lay cold between them. Snape’s face recovered from a momentary flash of disbelief, becoming hard and resolute again.</p><p>“Do not say such things lightly.”</p><p>“I don’t,” Draco snapped, the wolf lay in the undertone of his words “Now if you don’t mind, Professor, I’m late for my next class.”</p><p>Snape stood a fraction taller now, watching him with an inscrutable eye. He motioned curtly towards the door, and Draco was gone, knowing full well that this would not be the last of Snape’s interference.</p><p> </p><p>*</p><p> </p><p>The wolf could feel himself being followed. Whatever it was, it was keeping a cautious distance, halting and hiding whenever the wolf was still. The perusing feet were unsure and gentle, crunching leaves under foot in a slow, rolling motion. The wasps in the moon hummed eagerly. The wolf hatched a plan.</p><p>He saw his path in his mind, a precise trail through the forest. He trod it, bounding about and play-acting that he didn’t know he was being pursued. A sniff here, a dig there, a scratch here. <em>Look at me, look at me, look at me. </em>All appeared wild and random. The wolf wove his path in a deliberate, tightening spiral, with the one who pursued him at its centre, backing cluelessly into a thicket of tightly packed trees.</p><p>The wolf could smell him now – it was a him. He was steeped in the scent of the castle. Underneath, in the space between his robes and his skin, was the smell of fascination tinged with fear, just enough to carry true courage, like the fine under-point on which a top spins. The wasps in the moon were frenzied now, busy, intent, as if in the unnatural act of making honey. Such was their intensity that the wolf could only see in stark flashes of red, their desire stung his head and made him drool. The human perusing him was special.</p><p>It was a him, and it was a human. The wolf could smell that he was close, but he could not see him. He should be caught in the knot of trees in front of him, but the wolf’s keen eyes could see nothing but empty space there. The smell was growing stronger, the breathing was warm, growing hotter, gathering close around the human’s body, unable to move through the night air. The wolf could hear him, but he wasn’t there. The wolf felt tricked. Was he not the clever one?</p><p>Disappointed, the wolf prowled about with his nose to the ground, searching and whimpering, wanting to be heard. He should be here.</p><p>A deep hunger opened up in the wolf, swimming with strangeness and distress. It made him want to howl – to raise this new emptiness up from his gut and toss it up to the moon in a long, grieving song. If only he could find him. If only he could eat him. The human’s magic would taste like amber red honey on his tongue. The wasps in the moon sympathised with him, agreeing with him. If the wolf could find the human, they promised that consuming him would be like taking the sun in his mouth, and swallowing all of its pure fire, brightness, and renewal.</p><p>With a jolt of excitement, the wolf sniffed between the trees again, sure that he was closer this time. His wet nose met with something that felt like a toe. No sooner had the wolf looked up, his eyes were met with a cruel flash and his whole body was thrown violently into the air. There was a shout behind it, echoing through the trees as the wolf hit the floor in an undignified heap of limbs. He scrabbled to his feet, confused and hurt. He made a good chase, his speed making a blur of the forest floor, the same blur that the water makes of the river bed. But the invisible boy was gone.</p><p> </p><p>*</p><p> </p><p>Draco turned the galleon hopelessly over and over in his hand. When there was news, the coin burned. But it was cold. It had been cold for days, barely gaining any heat from his hand, convulsing over it in a continuous, nervous twitch. He slid to the floor, hidden in the furthest stall of the disused girl’s bathroom. The bolt rattled in the door with his uneven, panicked sobs.</p><p>It was over. Dumbledore was gone. It was all over for him. His mother would die, his father would rot in prison, and it was all his fault. He had had all this opportunity to plan, and to act, and what had he done with it? Wasted time bewitching barmaids and hunting rabbits. If he didn’t do something drastic soon, he would die. He would surely die.</p><p>Draco’s ability to breathe was rapidly leaving him. Cold sweat washed over him in a baptism to failure, as he lost sensation in his fingertips, the beginning of the numb panic spreading through him. The ground rose up to meet his cheek. He lay drawing in fractured, hopeless breaths on the floor until his wits abandoned him. The wasps in the moon taunted him – told him the solution was there, it was obvious – he wasn’t trapped, he was just a coward. A hand that wasn’t really there choked him, squeezing this throat until his breath was a hard pebble, stuck beneath the pressure. A man who wasn’t really there pressed his whole weight on to Draco’s ribcage. He was sure that the bones would give and splinter inside him – he almost welcomed it.</p><p>If he died here, would he become a ghost? If he was a ghost, would he be a wolf, or a boy? When he passed through people, would they feel as shit-scared as he did now? Would he taste of fear or failure when they breathed him in?</p><p>But he wasn’t a ghost. Not yet. When Draco came back to himself he was in the fetal position, his body leaving a shining smear mark on the tiles where he lay, the escaped heat of his panic misting the floor’s surface like breath on a looking glass. Moaning Myrtle was shrieking and wailing above him.</p><p>“HE’S DEAD! HE’S DEAD! HE’S DIED OF FRIGHT!”</p><p>She seemed to be enjoying her dramatics. Draco grappled inside himself for the strength to silence her. She was just as disappointed as him to see colour return to his pallid cheeks.</p><p> </p><p>*</p><p> </p><p>Draco watched the night through the wolf’s eyes. He understood the night better now. He knew the rules of the waking dream. He envied the wolf’s freedom, as well as the love and guidance of the moon. She told him to eat what he loved and to fight those who sought to take it from him. There was no room for questioning.</p><p>The wolf stood back from the forest paths, his ears alert and pointed, scanning the area for movement. The spiders were leaving their nest, hundreds of hooked, hairy feet crawling in a swathe through the forest. Their procession filled the pathways and overflowed upwards, into the branches of the trees. Other creatures stood at a respectful distance, watching the parade in solemn silence.</p><p>The young spiders were carrying their father on their backs. Aragog’s great size had diminished a little in death, his monstrous body crumpling in on itself like parchment succumbing to flame. He lay overturned, his many eyes still open, watching his many children upside down, as if they walked along the underbelly of the clouds in the sky, carrying him to make a new web amongst the stars.</p><p>As the huge body bobbed and swayed away, carried off into the trees, Draco wondered if he had the strength to carry his own father alone. The role of protector was given to him now. He was the agent of the Dark Lord, and his father’s life, such as if was, hung in the balance.</p><p>Draco may never see him alive again. This fact shook his nerves as a human, but came to him cleanly as a wolf, without lingering sentimentality. It would be Draco who would collect Lucius’s body from Azkaban, made lighter by the years of the Dementor’s greedy kisses. If his father was released before his death, he would come to know that his only son was a half-breed, half-blood, and no longer wholly his. He would have to share him with the moon.</p><p>Draco had never doubted the strength of his father’s love for him, until now. In his polluted state, he was no longer his father’s image. Draco still possessed his inherited skin, his bones, his hair, the ghost of his father’s voice in everything that he said – but not his purity.</p><p>His purity had been sacrificed to make him the perfect weapon. A weapon for someone else’s wants and needs. This was the reason Draco would not allow the wolf to do his work for him. He was cunning enough, and powerful enough on his own to get the deed done, without resorting to animalistic barbarism. He was different from the others. He was still his father’s son.</p><p>The Dark Lord and his followers were waiting for him to die, or disgrace his family, or both, but he would show them. Even if his father would never look at him again, he would show them. He would not sink so low as to weaponise his impurity. He was not so easily exploited. Upon his return, he would be outcast yet victorious, a murderer who had done what the Dark Lord could not. He would kill Dumbledore – the only man who had ever insulted his father and felt no consequences – and he would do it with nothing but his wits, and his magic. He would restore the Malfoy name. He would earn it back for himself again.</p><p> </p><p>*</p><p> </p><p>
  <em>Why was Potter looking at him like that? </em>
</p><p>It was only the two of them and McMillan in Slughorn’s class that afternoon, and Potter was doing a very poor job of covertly watching Draco over his copy of Advanced Potion Making. His green eyes were intense with thought, as though trying to answer a difficult question.</p><p>Draco knew full well that he looked peculiar these days. He still did his best to avoid mirrors. The cabinet and his transformations were taking more out of him than they gave back. His skin hugged his bones closer, his complexion was ashen, and sore veins of tiredness reached around his eyeballs, straining to touch his iris. But he hadn’t expected Potter to notice. Or, more specifically, he hadn’t expected Potter to notice and be puzzled.</p><p>Even with all the suspicion Potter had harboured for him over the years, Draco knew that he wasn’t a threat. Not a true threat, anyway. If he was, the wolf would stir inside him. The wolf had good instincts for danger.</p><p>Draco cast Harry a <em>“would you like a picture?”</em> look. Caught out, he bristled, looking awkwardly away and busying himself with lighting the kindle underneath his cauldron. Draco watched him a moment longer – he’d never realised how much thinking Potter did with his hands before; his finger skated down the contents page of his potion’s book, both hands fumbled gathering ingredients, his brain lagging behind his actions. As he began to chop the peppermint, Harry’s eyes were on his instructions, and not the silver knife. Part of Draco tensed, clenching somewhere near his midriff, waiting for the blade to slice through Harry’s hand. This urge wasn’t out of spite, or malice as it had been for so many years. The feeling was marred, almost sweetened, by the wolf’s desire. If the wolf could take form in the room, he would toss his nose about to smell Potter’s blood on the air. Given the chance, he would lick the wound clean with his long tongue.</p><p>Throughout the lesson, honey-red flashes of distraction ruptured every train of thought Draco attempted to follow. The low rumble of the wolf’s hunger pushed up through his subconscious, like mist from the pours in the ground. The hiccuping solution he was brewing was going very badly. Draco knew the wolf did not, and would not care. Why did he have to inherit the wolf’s distractions, while the wolf remained immune to his cares and needs?</p><p>Despondently, he looked to Harry again. The potion on his desk was a triumphant sunshine yellow, lighting the underside of his throat like a buttercup. Draco licked his lips, the wolf rumbling in his stomach. Harry caught his stare and replied with a bright, gloating smile, which only tempted Draco further to let the wolf have his way.</p><p> </p><p>*</p><p> </p><p>When Draco slept, the wolf took him into his dreams.</p><p>He was in the wasp’s nest. The white, woven walls rose up in a papery dome around him, glowing with borrowed light. Draco lay, buried alive in thousands and thousands of wasps, layered so thickly around him that he felt as if he were submerged in a mire of tar, or honey. The wasps did not sting him. Their shining bodies glistened under a fresh glare of light. Peering up through the writhing mass, Draco could see a perfect, circular hole in the roof of the nest. He reached out his arm, soon consumed by crawling insects. Not a patch of his skin was visible to him, vibrating under the buzz of the wasps on him. Still, he reached, stretching further and further. His fingers met an impossibly bright sphere. Grasping it tightly, he drew it closer. The wasps grew louder. Draco took the sun into his mouth.</p><p>All burned together.</p><p> </p><p>*</p><p> </p><p>“Harry!” Draco was woken by a familiar voice, not so far off from were he lay “Oh my gosh, Harry look.”</p><p>“I can see him, Hermione,” Potter’s voice sounded irritated, his words rubbing up against his impatience.</p><p>“But… this means...”</p><p>“I think the phrase you’re looking for is ‘you were right,’”</p><p>“Well, we don’t exactly know that for sure–”</p><p>“Are you kidding me?!”</p><p>With a groan, Draco opened his eyes to see Harry and Hermione bickering just over ten feet away from him. Silence fell abruptly between the three of them.</p><p>Harry had his wand pre-emptively drawn out in front of him. He approached Draco with some hesitance, as if he were still a wild animal. Draco noted that his hair was even more unkempt than usual, and there were faint shadows underneath his eyes. Had they been tracking him all night, under the full moon?</p><p>Hermione stood back, her arms bursting with two sprawling bouquets of monkshood and foxgloves, the tall stems lolling over both of her shoulders. She would have looked a little like she had been awarded a prize, where it not for her ugly herbology gloves, and the twigs caught in her bushy hair. When he met her gaze, she spun awkwardly on the spot, looking away as if the eye contact had made him more naked than before.</p><p>They had discovered him in a post-transition state, sleeping on a bed of moss in the dawning light. The woods were no longer his sanctuary. The jig was up. The secret no longer a secret. Draco knew he should be panicking, but all that was coming to him was laughter. Mad, wild laughter. Harry took a step back, a little bewildered.</p><p>“It was you, invisible in the woods,” Draco managed through his laughing fit, sprawled on the ground as if under a tickling jinx.</p><p>“We know what you are, Malfoy,” Harry attempted a firm, serious tone “I’ve known since I saw you on the Hogwarts Express.”</p><p>“I wanted to...” Draco continued, still laughing as if Harry hadn’t said anything, trying to get a hold of himself “...I was going to eat you! Can you imagine?! Saint Harry Potter, the boy who lived, our saviour, the chosen one, gobbled up – eaten, by accident – by a, by…!” Draco lost himself again to the ridiculousness and hilarity of it all, howling with laughter so strong it made his stomach ache.</p><p>Hermione shot a worried look over her shoulder, which Harry answered with a low, hissed “It’s not my fault he’s gone mental,” before turning back to Draco sarcastically “Yes, yes hilarious Malfoy, can you please... just...” he trailed off, frustrated by the persistent laughter emitting from his boyhood enemy, still naked on the ground. Draco got the impression that Harry had imagined this going very differently.</p><p>When Harry’s eyes chanced another look at Draco, they found the bite mark on his forearm. His expression lost some of its confrontation, softening as he looked over each lump and gouge of the scar tissue. Instinctively, Draco shifted his body to hide the mark from view. When their eyes met again, Harry blinked away his embarrassment, taking off his own cloak and holding it out at arms length, offering it to Draco to cover himself up.</p><p>He didn’t take it. Draco had always enjoyed an opportunity to make Potter squirm. Hermione turned again, eyes scrunched shut to preserve Draco’s modesty, shouting back at him,</p><p>“Can’t you see?” there was a pleading note in her voice “We’re trying to help you.”</p><p>Draco really laughed at that. He thought he was going to burst and split apart. The pale skin of his belly quivered with the sound, stretched tight on the tent poles of his hip bones, vibrating with laughter. Harry caught himself looking again and threw the cloak over him, turning away to hide the fierce glow of his blushing. This would surely finish him off.</p><p>“No one can help me,” said Draco, finally recovered, his eyes wet with tears “No one.”</p><p>If only the Dark Lord could see him now.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Thank you so much for reading! I hope you enjoyed, this was a lot of fun to write. Comments are really appreciated ~</p></blockquote></div></div>
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